By Dr Duncan Du Bois
The Standard Bank’s commitment to driving economic growth while progressively withdrawing from financing coal-fired power stations constitutes a contradiction that is based on falsehood. Ironically, its statement in Business Report of March 17 makes no mention of the Bank’s policy regarding Sasol which converts coal to gas, fuel and chemicals.
If the decision-makers at Standard looked beyond the Paris Cop26 agreement and distinguished between propaganda and science, they would note that there is no global warming and that climate change is a natural, historical occurrence.
They would then note that in the past 2,000 years there have been two global warming periods – one in the late Roman period and the other between 800 and 1400AD – when fossil fuels were not in use as they are today.
Standard Bank should note what President Obama’s former Under-Secretary for Energy, Dr Steven Koonin, has stated. Koonin, a physicist at New York University, is one of many scientists who regard the claim of global warming as sheer alarmism.
In June 2021, on Fox News, he emphasised that there had been no change in the warmest temperatures over the past 60 years. Data also shows no shrinking of the ice in Antarctica or increase in hurricane activity.
Dr Frank Schnell, author of The Age of Stupid, points out that climate alarmists base their predictions on less than one percent of data. Their selective extrapolation of weather extremes from the UN’s 3,949 page Sixth Assessment Report, provide emotional impetus for their agitation propaganda.
Schnell, Koonin and a host of independent scientists have posited that if all fossil fuels were abandoned the difference that would make would be less than two-tenths of a degree Celsius. Global warming caused by fossil fuels is a falsehood.
South Africa has an abundance of coal which needs to be exploited if the economic growth Standard Bank envisages is to occur. Failure to exploit those resources is going to aggravate unemployment and diminish economic growth prospects.
Since 20 percent of Standard Bank is owned by China which builds coal-fired power stations and ignores the propaganda of the Paris Climate Accord, how does Standard Bank CEO Sim Tshabalala intend to explain his coal policy to his Chinese shareholders?
Dr Duncan Du Bois
Bluff, Durban
BUSINESS REPORT ONLINE